There are many important traits of leadership, and one of them is being willing to do just a little bit more than you need to on a daily basis.
For example, let’s assume your commitment to yourself is to connect with 10 people per day, 5 days a week, to talk about your business. Now imagine if you were to not stop after you completed your 10 calls, but you were to make an additional 3 calls each day. This would amount to an extra 15 people per week you would be exposing to your business, and 780 additional people you’d expose your business to over the course of a year!
So imagine if you applied this principle to all areas of your life, and you went above and beyond what’s expected to you in your relationships, your fitness, etc. What would the quality of your life be like then?
The Compound Effect Principle
Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success Magazine, wrote a great book entitled The Compound Effect. In this book, he explains the difference that small actions done on a daily basis can have on our lives over time. It’s literally amazing what can happen just by making a few small changes.
Here’s an example. Imagine if you ate a bacon cheeseburger once a month. What are the long term effect of that action? Probably not a whole lot. But now imagine if you ate that same bacon cheeseburger every day for an entire year. Do you think that small action would have a long term result? Like some serious weight gain, a rise in your cholesterol level, some clogged arteries, etc? You bet it would.
Now imagine the flip side of that. Imagine if one day you decided to cut out 200 calories from your diet. Would that have much of an impact on anything? No… probably not. But now imagine if you cut 200 calories out of your diet every day for an entire year. Do you think you might see some changes in your weight? You’ve just cut out 73,000 calories over the couse of a year… I’d be willing to bet you’d notice a difference.
The point here is that these changes are really easy to make, and they’re also really easy NOT to make. Many people have a hard time committing to small changes in their lives because there’s no instant gratification. But one of the keys to leadership and success is the willingness to commit to a small change today (and every day over a period of time) in order to experience a huge payoff down the road.
Leaders are people who have vision… they are able to look into the future (a year from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now), and they are willing to put some small actions in place today for the benefit of their future.
Here’s a short video on this topic:
So what are some small positive changes you can implement in your life today? Share your commitments in the comments below…
And here’s to your wild success…
